A wide variety of situations exist in which improved situational awareness may be of critical importance. For instance, air traffic controllers need to be aware of where their aircraft are, where other controllers' aircraft are as the aircraft enter air space controlled by the first controller, and to where those aircraft might be traveling. If the controller's knowledge can be improved, then it might be possible to safely allow more aircraft to traverse a given volume of airspace at any given time. Likewise, emergency workers responding to natural disasters, as well as members of the armed services, need to be aware of the actions their teammates and other parties may be undertaking. Failure to quickly and correctly comprehend and assess the situation (i.e. having insufficient situational awareness), particularly failure to know the positions of cooperating parties, may produce less than optimal team performance.
Situational awareness is also of increasing importance because many organizations are increasing the use of unmanned aerial vehicles (UAV) to reduce costs and personnel risks while also improving the organization's effectiveness. Scenarios in which several UAVs cooperate to accomplish a mission (e.g. a search) give rise to the possibility that the operator of one UAV may not accurately know the position of another UAV. Thus, the operator may partially duplicate a search already conducted by the operator of the other UAV or be unable to respond to requests for assistance from the other UAV operator. For example, if a UAV operator is pursuing two suspects and the pair of fugitives split up to escape, the operator of another UAV (who is unfortunately not aware of the pursuing UAV's current whereabouts) might be unable to acquire one of the two suspects rapidly enough to prevent one of the fugitives from evading the pair of pursuing UAVs that are cooperating such that first UAV maintains the pursuit of one suspect while the second UAV acquires, and pursues, the other suspect.
Thus, a need exists to provide a simple, intuitive way to improve the situational awareness of operators, particularly when more than one human-in-the-loop system cooperates with another to accomplish a common goal.